My innate curiosity and youthful rebelliousness to denounce worldly injustices brought me to this profession of journalism, which is becoming more ramshackle and gossipy every day, more blunt and decadent, with apologies and admiration for those who continue to struggle in strict compliance with our beaten-down code of ethics. And I suppose that in that curiosity and in the spirit of denouncing the unjust nestles my desire to cross borders. Whenever I have travelled, I have always felt the urge to cross that mental and physical line that separates states. The curiosity to know what lies behind each border.
I flew to Costa Rica and instead of landing in San José to go down to Puerto Viejo, I landed in Liberia, in the middle of the Pan-American Highway, being close to the Nicaraguan border, which I soon crossed to end up spending as much time with the poor Nicas as with the Ticos. I witnessed Nicaraguan wetbacks crossing the San Juan River to El Dorado in Costa Rica; a family offered me the chance to pass with them to avoid hundreds of kilometres back to Liberia, but I gave up: I would not have been able to leave the country on my return to Spain as I would not have had an entry stamp in my passport. In the end I was able to cut it short at a nearby border control and, yes, I did travel through Costa Rica, heading for Puerto Viejo, then a veritable paradise with hippies who had transhumed through Ibiza, very close to the Panamanian border, which I didn’t cross for lack of time, not desire.
However, despite my obsession with crossing borders, I recognise that there is bad blood in them. Things happen, not exactly good things, and most of the time, unnoticed, hidden. They are steeped in mystery, abuse, frustration, cruelty and violence.
Over the eight-metre-high fence, rusted by the ravages of the sea and half buried in the sand of the Tijuana beach that marks the western border between Mexico and the US, hung posters with the number of dead who had tried to jump over it, phrases alluding to freedom and the desire to cross into Yuma (US) territory, and the forgotten names of lost bodies. I stared at it in awe for a long time, my feet in the cold water: to the left the Pacific, in front of me the cage that blocked the way to San Diego and the capital of the world, to the right, Tijuana. There were bad vibes. A kind of cemetery festooned with crosses painted on the fence. Some kids bathed on the beach, oblivious to everything, and from time to time there were strollers, few and meditative. I suppose that today, 30 years later, that photograph could also be taken here, in Ceuta and Melilla.
Borders are sensitive areas; they are the first thing to be closed when there are conflicts in a country, both internal and external. Like closing the door of the house to the intruder, even if ‘the intruder’ sometimes nests inside: the fact that one is from ‘here’ is not proof of goodness, far from it, even if it gives us, from the outset, more confidence.
The film ‘Green Border’ by Agnieszka Holland recreates another inhumane border focus, the tremendous drama of refugees from the Middle East who want to enter the EU illegally through the forests of Belarus and Poland and the cruel and unnecessary responses of the policemen stationed there. Highly recommended viewing.
When the Anglo-Saxon term globalisation became popular – the second globalisation, the first being from the Age of Discovery – which some prefer to call mondialisation because of its French roots, we welcomed it with great hope. Concern about border fences would decline and, from a certain utopia and innocence, we would be able to wade by rivers and walk mountains without having to hold our passports in our mouths in those spaces where people are triaged according to their origin, economic level or ideology. Relations between countries would be more fluid and beneficial.
And yet, today, borders must continue to exist to order the large flows of migrants and avoid unwanted disorder and clashes. This does not prevent us from drawing attention to the tremendous abuses and arbitrariness that these borders generate, when not territorial wars (Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Middle East, etc.). That we are not improving is demonstrated by the fact that 2023 was the bloodiest year since the Swedish University of Uppsala, an international benchmark of credibility, began collecting data on deaths in conflicts in 1989.
The near future, with Donald Trump leading the most powerful and influential country on Earth, points to a resurgence of territorial closures and tensions, new crises, recomposition of alliances and cuts in the welfare state, with China at the opposite pole and ready to also activate its great territorial power as a result of its extensive and intense international expansion.
In our EU, perhaps it is time to work towards a serious rethinking of its policy of strategic alliances in order to direct it towards neighbouring powers, as former Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos explained explicitly and convincingly in a conference he gave a few months ago at the Hotel Valparaíso in Palma de Mallorca.
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